posted 20-10-2021 10:06 ET (US)
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(from the Toronto Star - basically, the underlying story here is that Canada is now content to ride upon somebody else's coat-tails, in that we will only contribute sub-units which will fall under somebody else's unit command ... all together now: can we say "second rate", or "colonial troops"? In this example, the Dutch are sending over 1,000 troops, and Canada will contribute only a company ... after the engineers have returned home.)

Canada to send UN mission to Ethiopia

OTTAWA (CP) - A joint Canadian-Dutch military reconnaissance mission will head for Ethiopia later this month as the advance guard of a new UN peacekeeping operation.

The Canadian Forces are expected to contribute about 400 soldiers to the 4,200-member peacekeeping operation for a single, six-month deployment.

The troops are expected to be drawn mainly from the 2nd battalion, the Royal Canadian Regiment, based at Gagetown, N.B. Some specialists - in short supply in the Forces - will be drawn from other army, navy and air force units.

Although the initial warning order went out to the military last month, the peacekeeping operation will not be announced formally until the recon mission is completed, sources said.

Parliament discussed the deployment earlier this week, although there was no vote taken.

The Canadian contingent, basically a reinforced company of mechanized infantry equipped with armoured vehicles, will be temporarily augmented by up to 200 engineers.

The engineers will go in to erect the necessary infrastructure - housing, storage facilities, communications links and power systems - then return home.

The Canadians will be part of an 1,100-member Dutch contingent. Jordan is also contributing to the force, which will patrol between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The two countries in the Horn of Africa, the eastern shoulder of the continent, fought a bitter war earlier this year in the dry, rocky no-man's-land that makes up their ill-defined mutual border.

The United Nations Security Council sent military observers to the area in the summer. In September, the council approved the dispatch of the peacekeeping force.

This new deployment will bring the number of Canadian troops serving overseas to about 2,900. The majority, about 1,800, are with the NATO stabilization force in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The rest are parcelled out in penny packets around the world.

The Ethiopia mission follows a new model for the Canadian Forces that was pioneered in East Timor last year.

In the past, Canada either sent specialists - signallers and engineers for example - or contributed infantry battalions to UN missions. But the stress of maintaining its commitment to the Balkans - Canadians have been in the former Yugoslavia since 1992 - has led to a change in the way mission are assembled.

As in East Timor, the Ethiopian mission involves a small group of infantry that will be fitted into a larger, foreign contingent; in the case of East Timor, the Canadians joined an Australian battalion, in Ethiopia, they will merge with the Dutch.

The other factor is the six-month time limit. In the former Yugoslavia, the open-ended commitment has led to a series of six-month rotations. These place a heavy strain on the limited ranks of the army's infantry because for every soldier overseas, there must be two at home, one resting up from the last rotation, another training for the next stint.

By sending only a company to Ethiopia and limiting the commitment to six months, the Forces can participate in the mission without making a long-term commitment that would add more strain to an already stretched fabric.
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Third World troops risk all as rich nations foot the bill

By COLUM LYNCH in New York

United Nations peacekeeping is being largely subcontracted to Third World soldiers who endure the risks and fatalities while Western nations bear the financial cost.

As recently as the early 1990s, United States and European soldiers formed the backbone of UN forces trying to keep the peace in Cambodia, Somalia and the Balkans.

But as developed nations have scaled back their involvement in UN missions, African and Asian soldiers have been pushed into dangerous conflicts; a situation increasingly under attack as unfair.

"You can't have a situation where some people contribute blood and some contribute money," said Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister who headed a UN panel that studied peacekeeping and presented proposals for reform in August.

"That's not the UN we want."

In the first 10 years of UN peacekeeping, from 1948 to 1958, most international casualties, including 41 out of 54 deaths, were among US, Canadian and European troops. Today, if a UN peacekeeper is killed, he is likely to be from Africa or Asia.

In Sierra Leone, the largest and most dangerous of current UN missions, all 21 fatalities this year have been troops from developing nations - Nigeria, Kenya, India, Ghana, Guinea, Zambia and Jordan.

Bangladesh, a big troop contributor, proposed last week that the UN Security Council's five permanent members - the US, Russia, Britain, France and China - each be required to provide at least 5 per cent of the troops for any UN peacekeeping operation that they authorise. None of the permanent members supported the proposal, and it was dropped.

Developing nations supply more than 75 per cent of the nearly 30,000 UN troops taking part in 15 missions around the world. The five largest contributors - India, Nigeria, Jordan, Bangladesh and Ghana - supply about 13,700 soldiers, well over a third of all UN "blue helmets".

The US, Japan and Europe, on the other hand, provide relatively few troops but will be billed for more than 85 per cent of the $US3billion ($5.78billion) cost of UN peacekeeping this year.

Some troop providers are losing patience. Jordan recently joined India in announcing plans to withdraw from the UN operation in Sierra Leone, citing in part the failure of NATO countries to participate.

The current division of labour also contrasts starkly with the early days of UN peacekeeping, when US soldiers joined European, African and Asian troops in trying to keep the lid on border disputes and civil wars from the Sinai to the Congo.

In the early '90s, the US participated in a coalition of troops trying to prevent starvation and restore order in Somalia. But after 44 Americans were killed there, President Bill Clinton in May 1994 imposed strict conditions for US involvement in UN peacekeeping. American participation has since plunged from more than 3,300 troops in 1993 to zero today.

US and European officials insist that they are carrying their weight. They note that most of the 65,000 peacekeepers under NATO command in Kosovo and Bosnia are from the United States and Europe.

Canada accused of opting for easy UN mission
Armies from poor nations left with dangerous postings

Steven Edwards
National Post
UNITED NATIONS - Canada is among a host of developed countries that have agreed to join a relatively straightforward United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Horn of Africa while leaving dangerous assignments in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo to armies from poor nations, UN officials are privately grumbling.

Although Canadian officials will not confirm the number, UN sources say 60 Canadian troops will arrive on Monday in the border area between Ethiopia and Eritrea to back military observers of a ceasefire between the two countries, which signed a peace agreement in June.

According to officials from the Netherlands, which will command the mission, they will be the first of up to 400 Canadian soldiers from a mechanized infantry unit who will eventually be deployed in the region. Troops from more than 20 other countries, half of them developed ones, will also take part in the mission.

While UN officials say they welcome the commitments, they complain that developed countries are not as eager to join more difficult missions that are desperately short of troops.

Months of effort to get a UN force mobilized across the sprawling jungles of Congo, where six nations and a host of rebel groups are fighting, has yielded little more than a handful of military observers, two of them Canadian.

In Sierra Leone, a UN force made up of Third World troops faces attacks by a rebel movement whose brutality strains belief. Pleas by Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, for developed countries to join the mission have been ignored. Only Britain has offered combat support, but that country has refused to place its troops under the UN flag.

Developed nations began scaling back their participation in UN peace missions following UN failures in Somalia and Rwanda in the early 1990s.

While developed countries still pay most of the costs of the peace ventures, Third World countries provide most of the troops.

Under pressure to change that arrangement, developed countries have volunteered in droves for the Horn of Africa mission, with Austria, Finland, Italy Spain, Sweden and Switzerland among those that have signed up in addition to Canada and the Netherlands.

The reason for their eagerness is clear to representatives of developing countries.

"This is a simple, traditional peacekeeping mission that I expect will succeed brilliantly," said Legwaila Joseph Legwaila, Botswana's ambassador to the UN and the mission head.

Indeed, the UN has chalked up several successes when faced with helping to settle "traditional" inter-state disputes.

The force will patrol a region where Ethiopian and Eritrean troops have stared at one another from their respective trenches for months without firing a shot.

Although the final force will be comprised of 4,200 soldiers, U.S. officials said in the wake of the ceasefire agreement that as few as 1,200 to 2,000 troops could do the job.

"It seems that developed countries are tiptoeing back," said one UN source. "But they are trying the waters in missions that are safer, leaving harder missions to countries such as Bangladesh, Zambia, Ghana -- to name just a few participants in the Sierra Leone mission."

Another added: "In the Horn of Africa, they will be patrolling a border area. It's not the same as moving against rebels in the diamond areas of Sierra Leone or in the Congo."

Canada already has 21 military observers in the region. The Netherlands will initially send 1,500 troops, then reduce that number to 900 after a few weeks.

"We and the Dutch agreed to supply a joint force which will be withdrawn after six months after the mission's foundation has been set," said Carl Schwenger, a spokesman for the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs.